I asked philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg) if he could share some of what he and colleagues in the Pa. State System are confronting. His account is bracing, and no doubt not unfamiliar elsewhere:
Pennsylvania has a very strange public higher ed system. On the one hand are the state-related universities like Penn State, University of Pittsburgh, and Temple. They get about 5% of their funding from the state. Then there are the 14 state-owned universities that comprise the PA State System of Higher Education (PASSHE). My university, Bloomsburg, is one of these. We get about 25% of our budget from the state. According to the system chancellor, out of 50 states, PA is 47th when it comes to funding public higher ed. The PASSHE schools are struggling due to a perfect storm of factors: years of underfunding, massive cuts after the 2009 fiscal crisis, declining numbers of high school graduates, and COVID. As a result, the majority of the 14 universities are insolvent, with cratering enrollments and debt they cannot escape.
The Chancellor has instructed that three universities in the western part of the State—California, Edinboro, and Clarion—merge. Also three in the mideastern part of the state are to combine. Bloomsburg is to merge with Lock Haven (70 miles away) and Mansfield (90 miles away). Bloomsburg is far and away the strongest and most solvent of the three, but this is like telling a struggling swimmer to save two drowning swimmers. We are advised that they are going to fire 2/3rds of the administrators, retrench some of the faculty, make us teach hybrid classes, and somehow everything is going to be OK. So my Dean or Provost could wind up being 90 miles away, and I never meet them except on Zoom. Oh, and all academic departments will be scattered objects. I will be the Chair of a philosophy department (assuming we survive) with members at three different constituent colleges.
The Chancellor has said that if this does not work, next year he will propose dissolving the state system altogether. Now, all of the PASSHE schools have proud histories going back to the 19th century. We only became a unified system in 1982. If we dissolve the system and all the universities remain public but independent, it will stop the financial drain from the stronger to the weaker schools. The result will be a Darwinian one: the strong survive and the weak perish. I have no idea whether this is ultimately for the best or not, but I certainly feel for all those perfectly decent scholars and staff who will lose their jobs.
Of course there was no systematic study done of possible alternative plans to these mergers, and no real economic analysis. We will marry in haste and repent at leisure. And it is a shotgun wedding: everyone is somewhere on the scale of worried to panicked. The state legislature is packed with businesspeople who think the sole purpose of a university is to feed young citizens into the maw of capitalism, so I am in the position of once again having to defend the existence of philosophy. It is grindingly depressing.
Readers aware of similar issues elsewhere should add details or links in the comments.
